Long damp summer

I finished walking by seven this morning and it is a good thing.  The air is so humid that even at 6:20 AM I was uncomfortable.  I can’t imagine what it was like in the days before air conditioning and yet I remember them!

The summer of 1958 I was eight years old.  My siblings and I woke up early and played in our bedrooms before going down to sit in front of the pattern on the television downstairs.  Cartoons came on later in the morning; probably around seven if it was Saturday and our mother came on a bit later than that.

She would come downstairs and sit in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the paper while making tall stacks of cinnamon toast that we were allowed to eat on the living room floor.  At eight o’clock my dog, Snorkel, a Scottish terrier, and I would burst through the front door and dash for the break in the bushes!  A few minutes later we arrived on the porch of my best friend and rang the doorbell.  Janet was two years to the day older than I was.  We shared a birthday.

While my day was two or three hours into it, she was often just getting started, but I would be allowed in to watch her eat a soft-boiled egg with a precision that fascinated me.  Then I would follow her around, even into the bathroom, as she got ready to play.

Sometimes we put a broomstick across the steps of her front porch and turned the smooth concrete there into a roller rink.  Sometimes we dragged her toy kitchen down to that porch and played house and other times we played cards on the chaise lounge or rode bicycles, or jumped on her pogo stick.  She taught me to play jacks and give the secret call, “Key Oh Key” whenever I rode my bike up a driveway, important things to know when you are eight years old.

In the afternoon I had to take a nap, or at least lie on the couch on my mother’s sun porch for an hour.  Those were the days of polio and summer strep and no one wanted to take a chance.  Then my mother would fill our wading pool and all of us would tear out there in our underpants to pretend we were dolphins and turtles, or great world-class divers like Lloyd Bridges in Seahunt.

 

Afterwards a shower in our basement and we would be put down to watch the Mickey Mouse Club, proudly wearing our ears and mouthing the words to the songs along with the Mousketeers.  Dinner was a late but formal affair in the dining room when my father came home and then we were back outside for the evening routine.

As my mother sat on the neighbor’s back patio visiting, we played Mother May I, or caught lighting bugs, or simply spun in circles until we fell dizzily to the ground in gales of giggles.  Sometimes our neighbor, who used to be a performer, sang us songs like “The Donkey On The Golden Staircase.”

And eventually it would be time for bed.  Time to go upstairs, put the jar of lightning bugs away with hopes that I might be able to read by them this time and climb onto sheets that were soon wrinkled and hot from the heat and humidity of a long summer’s day.  My mother would place an old black fan on a wooden chair in the middle of the room and it would laboriously grind back and forth pushing the damp air around, doing little good until I finally took off my pajama shirt and tucked it under my pillow.

I think that was the only time I really noticed the heat back then.